American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present

7 Espionage in the 1980s

7 87 87 Espionage in the1980s The 1980s became the “Me! Me! Me!” Generation of status seekers. “American Cultural History” website, Lone Star College–Kingwood In the 1980s, America turned away from the liberal idealism and social consciousnessoftheprevioustwodecadesandtowardself -centeredmaterialism and conservatism. After the economic downturn of the 1970s, national income rose 20 percent and Americans spent their newfound wealth on clothing, cars, and gadgets that proclaimed their social status. A study by the University of California and the American Council on Education in 1980 epitomized the goals of the Me Generation. According to the survey, college freshmen in America were more interested in status, power, and money than at any time during the past fifteen years, and business management was the most popular major.1 The materialist individualism of the Me Generation was captured in a poster that showed a fashionably dressed young man with a champagne glass in hand standing in front of a shiny Bentley sports car. The poster was captioned “Poverty Sucks.” The unabashed materialism of the decade was paralleled by a resurgence of unabashed patriotism after a decade that ended on a sour note for American prestige abroad. In 1979, Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the shah of Iran, a key US ally in the volatile Middle East, and Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979. The students, backed The Decade of the Spy: Soviet Spies of the 1980s 88 by Ayatollah Khomeini’s new fundamentalist regime, held fifty-two hostages in a humiliating saga that was splashed across the nation’s television screens daily during the fourteen-month crisis. As Americans celebrated the Christmas holidays the following month, the Soviet Union ended the détente that marked superpower relations in the 1970s by invading Afghanistan. Frustrated by negotiations to end the Iran hostage crisis, President Jimmy Carter approved a secret rescue mission that failed and contributed to his loss of a second term in the White House. President Ronald Reagan capitalized on America’s gloomy mood over its declining global prestige to defeat Carter in the first presidential election of the 1980s. As a final blow to Carter, the Iranians released the hostages minutes after Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. Reagan ushered in an era of patriotic conservatism when traditional values of hard work, patriotism, and faith in God that were once scorned as “establishment” virtues in the 1960s counterculture were back in vogue. The earlier rebellion of the nation’s youth came full circle. Young Americans raised the flag instead of desecrating it, military enlistments increased, and, according to a Gallup poll, 81 percent of teenagers were “very proud” to be Americans.2 Reagan vowed to restore American prestige around the world and confront the Soviet Union, which had taken advantage of US problems overseas to expand its influence. Reagan declared the Soviet Union to be an “Evil Empire” and took stronger measures to resist the Soviet threat than any previous president, vastly increasing defense spending and countering communist influence in every corner of the globe. Reagan’s aggressive policies aggravated the swelling problems of the “Evil Empire” in the 1980s. The Soviets were combating a well-armed insurgency in Afghanistan and confronting increasingly rebellious Eastern European satellites on their doorstep. As the Solidarity labor movement grew more strident, Polish communist leaders imposed martial law in 1981 as an alternative to a Soviet invasion. Soviet prestige suffered other embarrassing setbacks during the decade. The vaunted Soviet air defense mistakenly shot down a civilian Korean Airlines plane in 1983, and four years later failed to track a small airplane that a nineteen-year-old German pilot landed near Red Square in Moscow. In 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear reactor Espionage in the 1980s 89 exploded in Ukraine with disastrous consequences, the contamination of vast areas of the USSR, the evacuation and resettlement of thousands, and the spread of radioactive fallout over almost half the globe. By the mid-1980s, the Soviets had also endured geriatric leadership for decades. After eighteen years of rule by Leonid Brezhnev and his aging coterie, the Soviet Union experienced three rapid leadership changes. KGB chief Yuriy Andropov assumed the mantle after Brezhnev’s death, but died after fifteen short months on the job. His successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was, at seventy-three, the oldest leader in the USSR’s history, and he died after a year in office. In an abrupt change, the Politburo named a far...